Qualla: Jebel Sahaba

Jebel Sahaba: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among the skeletons that Fred Wendorf's team uncovered at Jebel Sahaba in the mid-1960s were two children buried together. One was about five years old. The other was about four. Lithic projectile points - the tips of arrows or spears - were embedded in the younger child's skull, femur, and pelvis. No skeleton at Jebel Sahaba tells a harder story than that double grave. The cemetery held sixty-four identifiable individuals. At least thirty-eight show signs of violent trauma. Jebel Sahaba, dating to around the 12th millennium BC, is one of the earliest clear pieces of evidence we have for organized human violence - a glimpse of people fighting over a shrinking Nile Valley as the wetter climate of the late Pleistocene began to fail.

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Jebel Sahaba: A Place of Three Cemeteries

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The site, also known as Site 117, sits in the Nile Valley near what is now the Sudan-Egypt border, in Northeast Africa. Three cemeteries cluster in the area - two at Jebel Sahaba itself, one on each side of the Nile, and a third nearby at Tuskha. All are now submerged beneath Lak...

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Jebel Sahaba: Reading the Bones

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Of the sixty-four skeletons initially uncovered, thirty-eight show some kind of trauma. Sixteen show injuries at or near the time of death - wounds that did not have time to heal. Stone projectile points were found embedded in or closely associated with twenty-one of the bodies. ...

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Jebel Sahaba: A Climate Out of Balance

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The current best explanation for what happened at Jebel Sahaba is environmental. The Qadan culture - the Late Pleistocene inhabitants of this stretch of the Nile, with whom the cemetery is tentatively associated - was among the first human groups to harvest wild cereals. They had...

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Jebel Sahaba: Honoring the Dead

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is worth pausing over who these people were. JS 44, an adult woman probably older than thirty, carried healed fractures on her left clavicle and right forearm - perhaps from the same bad fall - and a projectile fragment embedded in her ilium with bone laminated around it, sugg...

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